Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams

Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams presents a lesser-known dimension of celebrated photographer Ansel Adams’s body of work, and offers insight into a decisive and disquieting period in American history. The exhibition features fifty photographs by Adams of the Japanese American internment camp in Manzanar, California, during World War II. These photographs were the subject of Adams’s controversial book Born Free and Equal, published in 1944 while war was still being waged. The book protested the treatment of these American citizens and what Adams called their “enforced exodus.” Powerful forms of civic and artistic expression, the images speak to the Skirball’s mission of confronting injustice, embracing diversity, and preserving community.